Flower Lounge (20) -- Return to Hellhole

After living in dehumidified bubbles for decades, I had long forgotten how excruciating wet air is, and how much I loathed springtime.

While folks living in more temperate climates glorify the month of May, Pacific moisture smothers Hong Kong. It’s called Hui Nan — Return of the Southerly Wind. Condensate streaks down walls and furniture. Everything turns mouldy. It requires willpower to breathe.

As I laboured to take in the vicious air, trees and wild plants at bucolic Tong Fuk embraced it with a fresh coat of green. A layer of new life had emerged to mask the beginning, or end, of yet another cycle, bringing us closer to death. To us cons, nothing had changed otherwise, just the same routine over and over again in oppressive humidity.

My dorm-mates draped the coarse military blankets from bunkbed guardrails to dewater by gravity. After about half an hour, water started to drip from the bottom edge in big drops, making the floor wet and slippery. Preferring to keep my blankets evenly moist rather than partially soaked, I let mine be. They had become clammy and heavy, but the nights were still coolish. Anticipating a hot and wet summer in Tong Fuk was depressing.

On the 7th of May, I was summoned to Fingerprint Room and told that our appeal application would be heard in the High Court two days later. It will be an application hearing to decide if we had sufficient grounds for appeal. If the senior judges opined that we did, then our lawyer boys will try to get us out on bail to await the lengthy process. I tried to maintain an even mind. No anticipation. No wishful thinking. A guard had told me that even if appeal was granted, release from custody on bail was rare, averaging just a few per year according to Tong Fuk statistics. He was not the most encouraging person I knew, but brutally realistic.

But hope, like fear, or humidity, is hard to quell. The sages were right about it being a potential hazard. After receiving this hopeful news, I lost concentration for the rest of the day, attempting incoherently to think about nothing.

That evening, I distributed my meagre possessions to a few friends, in case I got lucky and stayed out on bail. A few cellmates wished me good luck. Uncle Zhao Xing, the mainland fisherman who smuggled three illegal workers across the border, shook my hand warmly and wished me luck. That was my second prison handshake. The first was with Joe the self-made Triad at Lai Chi Kok. I had been Uncle Zhao Xing’s only cellmate who listened to his story with sincere interest, and patience. Many bullied him mildly because he was a mainlander who never stuttered back. Though five years my junior, he loved telling me things as if I were a kid. I knew he’d miss me.

‘Thanks, Uncle Zhao Xing!’ I squeezed his enormous rough hand with both mine. I wanted to give him a hug if that wasn’t such an odd thing to do in the slammer.

I had used up all the cigarettes bought with my first pay check to settle various advance services. Stanley gave me six cigarettes to clear my current debts: Two for a haircut from Xiao Long on emergency notice; four to the Vietnamese who cleaned the workshop. Didn’t want to deny his hard-earned remuneration. Stan neither smoked nor ate junk food, and had been in jail for some time. He was loaded. Plus I somehow knew that we would meet again out there one day. Meanwhile, if I didn’t return, I knew he would miss having me to chat with. He still didn’t like talking to cons.

Ah Wah was happy for me, but a little melancholy, silently reading The Legend of the Condor Heroes again. Perhaps I reminded him that such moments of hope, however remote, however tenuous, however unpredictable and potentially toxic, were a luxury far beyond his wildest beaten dreams. It was then that I decided to write a story about him one day.

At breakfast next morning, Xiao Long came over my table to wish me luck. I told him I’ll transfer all good luck to him: ‘I don’t need good luck at my age, just no more bad ones. You can put good luck to better use, my friend.’ I meant every word of it. He accepted my two fags for the haircut only after I threatened to break them.

At nine, I reported to the Fingerprint Room. I was paid HK$646.40, the accrued balance of my sewing labour. I signed on the dotted line to acknowledge that it was final, fair, and accurate, thereby foregoing my rights to claim the CSD for the rest of my life. The money went into a plastic portfolio which will accompany me to Lai Chi Kok. If I returned after court appearance, which was more likely than not, the money will go straight back to the prison accountant.

‘Understood. Thank you, Sir.’

After settling the finance, I waited in the filing room where two inmate clerks were in attendance.

Being a clerk at the Fingerprint Room was a privilege reserved for educated inmates with no tendency or capacity for violence or escape. One of them was an amicable fellow from the show business, also an ICAC case. I didn’t ask him too many questions lest it reveal my total ignorance of Hong Kong showbiz personalities, something which he might have regarded incredible or phoney.

We chatted inconsequentially. He swore only sparingly, which sounded odd after more than two months of hearing fucks in every sentence. He knew a lot about the goings-on at Tong Fuk, and shared a few gossips. I pretended to be impressed. Filing clerks and drivers always know a lot about the inner secrets of things. In government offices, photocopying clerks know the result of a bid well before official announcement when they prepare multiple copies of contract documents submitted by the winning bidder. Since the Age of Computers, the lowly server engineer has unlimited access to all information going through the server. That practically includes everything these days, including the big bosses’ stealthy browsing habits behind closed doors. There’s no solution to these security weak points unless Mr. Chairman who hardly knows how to boot up his own machine maintains the server himself, or a Senior Inspector is willing to do the filing work at Tong Fuk.

Three hours passed easily. The past two months had trained me to be inordinately patient with idling. I could now sit for hours without knowing why, and not be irritated. My butt had developed a layer of rough skin on each cheek for this very task.

‘Want a piece of toast?’ One of the clerks asked out of the blue. It was nearly time for lunch, my least favourite meal of the day. They ate and slept apart from other inmates because they knew too much.

‘Toast? You have a toaster here?’

‘We have an iron,’ he gave a mischievous smile.

‘Oh yeah, I’d love to. Thank you.’

How many toasts had I had before? Thousands, many thousands. But that one prepared with an electric iron, hot and crispy, generously buttered by a bespectacled convict, was by far the best — absolutely memorable. Evidently, the household iron makes much better toasts than the toaster. I have not attempted to repeat the experience at home because my wife wouldn’t understand, and I don’t want to ruin the memory of the piece of magical toast I had in the filing office of Tong Fuk prison.

Another three hours had passed. It was a record. I was starting to wonder if this going-to-the-high-court thing was a prank after all when an officer came in and asked: ‘365820?’

Eh, with due respect, Ah Sir, do you see another person waiting here in the past six hours?

‘Yes sir!’

‘Follow me.’

‘Yes sir!’

Keung Gor, an inmate from the Kitchen Team, shared a handcuff with me.

We boarded a van. When exiting through the double-gated buffer zone, I saw the visitors entrance and thought of Satu and Fai coming out all this way to see me every week. On the right side was a sizeable alter of Guan Gong — a hero from the Three Kingdom Period universally revered by the underprivileged. He represents righteousness and bravery, and is the only semi-deified figure worshipped by cops and robbers, Triads and prison guards, restaurant operators, prostitutes et al. I mentally bowed as we passed, beseeching justice. For once, please, let justice be on my terms, according to my common sense, not the court’s.

Before I finished my longwinded mental petition, the final gate fanned open slowly, revealing a strange world which I had once taken for granted. We moved on. I stared straight ahead. Ah Zong had told me to never look back when leaving a prison. ‘Otherwise, bad fucking omen. Leave this behind. Leave everything behind, or you might come back.’ I followed his advice closely, brushing away the thought that it obviously hadn’t worked for him; he had been jailed quite a few times.

My handcuff-mate was about forty-something, of average height and slight build. He looked frail but tough — tough in terms of tenacity, not power. This combination of frailty and toughness no longer seemed oxymoronic. I had now met many poor, frail, but tough people. He seemed friendly, but compared with talkative Malay whom I had arrived with, he was mute.

We exchanged smiles, but did not converse. There would be time enough.

I was possessed by mortifying thoughts, imagining the worst, managing expectation.

A crabby judge might find our sentence unduly lenient tomorrow. ‘I am aghast at the light sentence dispensed for serious criminals like you two, especially you,’ he stabs at me with big round angry eyes. ‘You’ve been making denigrating remarks about the judiciary. You think we don’t know? Your notebooks have been monitored, but you’re stupid and arrogant enough not to have thought of that possibility in prison,’ he sneers. ‘You are to serve an additional three years for contempt of court, and for having wasted my time processing your asinine application.’

Cooourt!

I shuddered. I wouldn’t be surprised by such an outcome. Not anymore. Nothing surprised me anymore.

I finally succeeded in purging all hopes and expectations with the image of a fuming judge, grey curly horsehair standing erect on his head, wavering in an air-conditioned draught.

Keung Gor and I were the only unpaid passengers on the cruise to Lai Chi Kok. His arms and legs were blue with multiple tattoos. I didn’t stare long enough to discern the busy design. There might have been multiple layers, new patterns superimposed upon older ones.

‘I jumped bail for a minor DD eight years ago, and went to Shenzhen,’ he told me as the ferry set sail towards Stonecutter Island. DD is Dangerous Drugs, a CSD term for drug trafficking. ‘Back then, it was possible to await trial on bail for DD. No longer.’

In Shenzhen, he found a job, met a woman, and settled down as a normal hardworking salaried man. Soon, he got addicted to love and peace. When their four-year-old son couldn’t join his kindergarten field trips to Hong Kong because his identity was befuddled by his father’s problematic history, Keung Gor’s heart ached. He eventually checked with a lawyer who assured him that if he turned himself in, he would get about two years. His case was minor. It happened long ago, and the authorities were usually magnanimous with people who submitted without a chase. On that advice, he arranged things for the family, and turned himself in at the boarder.

Amazingly, he got exactly two years. The lawyer knew his stuff.

‘I have a bad case of nose and eye allergy, so am using this time to get free medical treatment,’ he told me. He was going to LCK that night for a medical appointment the next day. Convicts are taken to hospital in waist chains, like vicious dogs. A spectacle for bored waiting room patients.

It had been only two months since I last visited LCK, yet it looked very different. We were taken to a recently refurbished wing — a renovated hell hole. It used to be the women’s quarter. We took showers, then ate at the dining hall. There were other transiting inmates. I sat across the table from an ON, a Canadian from Toronto who graduated in criminology from Windsor where I did my bachelor in engineering. Small odd world indeed. I glanced at his ID. Fraud, it said.

Keung Gor knew LCK very well. We were assigned to a room currently occupied by two duty inmates from Tong Fuk. They had been staying at LCK temporarily due to medical reasons. One broke his shin bone playing football, and had to go to the hospital once every few days. They knew Keung Gor well. I was accepted immediately because I was a Tong Fuk man. It’s funny how anything in common, even a transient and distressing one, helps foster bonding. We exchanged news like captured soldiers from the same division reunited in a POW camp.

Unlike my first night at LCK two months ago, I slept soundly and heard no cats.

The next morning, we had room service breakfast. Due to some administrative mix-up, perhaps a good omen that I had already finished all my prison meals according to some celestial checklist, my name, number rather, was missing.

‘You must eat! You’re going to court. You need to be in good shape,’ Keung Gor insisted.

‘That’s fine. Missing breakfast won’t kill me. Don’t worry.’

He forced two packs of biscuits into my hand. They were emergency supplies given by his mates. He was at the bottom of the pay-scale due to frequent medical leaves, and could hardly afford junk foods. His friends gave him the biscuits in case he had to sit around for hours not knowing why and for how long, blood sugar plunging. I finally capitulated and ate them in front of him, thanking him profusely, secretly ashamed. In jail, two packets of soda biscuits were a lot more than just two packets of soda biscuits. I knew I would not have done the same to him had we swapped position. I was still a middle-class professional, albeit a retired one. I planned my resources carefully, especially when facing scarcity. I was incorrigibly sensible.

I was once again treated generously by someone who had nothing in common with me. And we both knew that in all likelihood, our paths would never cross again. Another goddamned guilt trip.

After breakfast, we were led to the Fingerprint Room. I promptly lost Keung Gor in the LCK chaos. I would have liked to say goodbye properly.

Carried by the human current, I sat and waited patiently, as was my new life-skill. An Indian inspector chatted me up. I mentioned jokingly that room service had forgotten my breakfast. ‘No! Can’t go to court with an empty stomach!’ Before I could protest, he ordered a plate delivered to me at the Fingerprint room. Was he the same guy who had helped me two months ago? Amidst great confusion, I had not registered his face, but I think he was a different person. ‘How come there’re so many great guys in this horrible place?’ I wondered.

I wasn’t hungry, but I cleaned my plate out of respect.

Right after that, with uncharacteristic haste, I was given my street cloths to change into. We had a court schedule to meet. The van which took me and a few others to court were compartmentalised. We were seated in our own little cage which reminded me of Catholic confession booths. I had nothing to confess. I regulated my breath, and mutely recited the Heart Sutra to put time away, lest it stretch and snap.

At the entrance of High Court’s basement carpark was another Guan Gong alter. Even the High Court lobbied for his patronage. I bowed imperceptibly. Hi there, Lord Guan.

In Cell No.69, I continued my silent chant of the Heart Sutra, again and again.

Bodhisattva Guanyin in deep Prajnaparamita meditation reflects upon the emptiness of the five aggregates, transcending all tribulations and sufferings…

I recited it vigorously in my heart to block out all thoughts. Existence is empty… Everything’s empty…

John went past in his office uniform, escorted by a guard. He didn’t see me. He somehow walked lighter in stiff heavy leather shoes than slippers.

I returned to the Heart Sutra…

‘Come!’ a guard said as he unlocked my cell.

‘Yes sir!’

It must have been about ten. After a busy morning, the day had only just begun. Getting up early made the day much longer. The judge was ready. To him, this pivotal occasion was the beginning of just another boring work day.

* * *

The next episode

Freedom will be uploaded around 29 Oct 2025

Soon I'll think about Freedom, and realise that it doesn't exist...